Pointers in Far Memory

Abstract

Effectively exploiting emerging far-memory technology requires consideration of operating on richly connected data outside the context of the parent process. Operating-system technology in development offers help by exposing abstractions such as memory objects and globally invariant pointers that can be traversed by devices and newly instantiated compute. Such ideas will allow applications running on future heterogeneous distributed systems with disaggregated memory nodes to exploit near-memory processing for higher performance and to independently scale their memory and compute resources for lower cost.